Thoughts on games (with probably too much computational complexity) updating every Tuesday and Friday some days during the school year

Friday, February 4, 2011

Game Description: Wythoff's Nim/Game

Last semester, one of my students presented Wythoff's Nim and did a great job explaining all the theory behind it. This is a simple, classic game with some beautiful properties, and something people continue to study variants of.

Wythoff's Nim (often called "Wythoff's Game") is just like playing "regular" Nim with two piles of sticks, except that you are also allowed to take X sticks from both piles, where X is any number. Thus, from the situation where the piles are of size 2 and 4 (we refer to this as (2,4)) legal plays include moving to (1,4) [taking one stick from the first pile], (2,0) [taking all four sticks from the second pile] and (1,3) [taking one stick from each pile]. Just as in Nim, the only location where no plays are available is (0,0).

This game is often envisioned as a Queen moving across a chess board, who starts anywhere on the board, and cannot move up or to the right. Players can thus move her left any number of spaces (subtracting from the first pile), down any number of spaces (subtracting from the second pile), or diagonally down and to the left (subtracting from both piles). This version of the game is visualized in the playable applet on this site.

This is naturally an impartial game, so the question arises: where are the P positions? (0,0) is automatically one, but (1,2) also does not have a safe move (all moves lead to N positions). (3,4) is not, (you can move to (1,2)) but (3,5) is. It turns out there is a very fancy trick for finding the P positions! This is a surprising application of the golden ratio, φ!

All P positions are of the form: (floor(k*φ), floor(k2*φ)) or the reverse. If we think about these as a sequence of pairs, ((a, b)k), then the sequences (ak) and (bk) are Beatty sequences, meaning that they intersect nowhere and contain all the natural numbers (not including zero, so we consider only those where k > 0). Try out the first few pairs, and you'll see that this makes sense. Thinking in terms of the Chess board and the queen, each row should have a P position, and can't have more than one.

Many variants of this game have been studied, many relating to the relevance of Beatty sequences, which I hope to talk about more in the future. This is otherwise an excellent game to learn to exploit the winning "trick" and then show off to your friends with.

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Combinatorial Game Man

artist: Molly Dannaher

What is This?

This blog is devoted to Combinatorial Game Theory! Combinatorial games are two-player games with no randomness, perfect information (no one has any hidden information) and no draws allowed, though sometimes topics stray into other types of games as well.

Please let me know if you are interested in either writing a guest post or suggesting a topic. I would like this to be more reflective of CGT as a whole and not restrict it to my take on things. Additionally, please help me fill out the table of game properties, either by suggesting games or letting me know about results!